bands to see live

I've been to a lot of shows that I really liked in the past semester, and some of us have been thinking about which other bands we would like to see.

So here's my list:
Metric
Okkervil River
Portugal. The Man
Sigur Rós
The National
Fleet Foxes
The Decemberists

These are the ones I would definitely go see. Okkervil River has been disappointing in their newer albums, but I think I would still go see them in case they play any of their awesome old stuff. I think Modest Mouse has moved beyond playing anything from Lonesome Crowded West, so I doubt I'd see them.

I am definitely going to see Stars again. Hopefully they'll come close though, so I won't have to be traveling or anything. All the bands I've seen this semester I would see again (Broken Social Scene, Of Montreal, Murder By Death).

Also I'm learning to bend notes on the harmonica. It's not an easy process unfortunately, but it's a necessary one if I'm supposed to become at all proficient.

wow

I'm listening to some Sigur Rós. It's pretty depressing. I shouldn't be listening to All Alright in the middle of the night.

Anyways I have pictures and videos from BSS and Of Montreal. One day I'll actually post things about them, maybe.

I still can't bend notes on the harmonica. Also I want a banjo.

oh fucking shit

Of Montreal!

I'm so sore that I have no intention of putting up pics/videos until tomorrow anyways.
And whatever pictures do get put up are probably all blurry. It was dark and I was trying not to jump all over the fucking place.

Actually I'm tempted to look at some of the pictures.

Hell I'll put up one picture on here, just for visuals.
And that's when he's clothed. I have a few where he's not so clothed.
And oodles of video. I don't know how much of each song I got, because there was a tall kid and my arms were sore from holding the camera up. Fuck tall kids who get in the way.

ugh

Some dumb fuck asswipe decided to erase my picture, which took 2 hours and was very pretty.
It was up for less than 8 hours.
So I decided to write a little note:

What USED to be on this board before someone thought it would be fun to erase it:

While a whiteboard on my door does invite others to contribute, simply erasing my drawing was both petty and uncalled for. Do you also like to torture small animals? You might want to get yourself checked. I bet you’re also the person who thinks drawing penises on this board is highly amusing. Yeah, definitely go get yourself checked. College might be a bit much for you. Take a break or something. OH WAIT. Maybe you DID want to contribute, but I purposely removed the marker so that the picture could at least be up for ONE DAY. Too bad you couldn’t draw penises all over the board, huh? I’m SO sorry for spoiling your fun. My friend said this was an offense that calls for murder, but I don’t know where you sleep and frankly don’t think you’re worth it (also I wouldn’t actually think about murdering anyone, if any UF officials think that statement was serious). You probably wet your bed anyways. You know what? I’ve got the perfect job for you. You would fit in well with the Spanish Inquisition. They definitely seem like your sort of people. Too bad you’re a few hundred years too late. Too bad people have become more intelligent and open to art. Too bad YOU HAVEN’T.

Anyways I’m going to go enjoy this concert later tonight. You’ll probably be crying yourself to sleep. Have a good life.

I printed that out and stuck it beside the whiteboard, which reads "who the FUCK erased my picture? it took me 2 hours. thanks ASSHOLE"

Anyways concert tonight.

Of Montreal

In preparation, I spent two hours with dry erase markers to recreate the album cover.
Of Montreal is TODAY.

well

I guess this is the long overdue blog post I've been procrastinating. Now there's just so much stuff idk what to start with. So I'll start where I left off.

The Murder By Death concert. Holy fuck that was a good concert. It was also on my birthday, so that just made it more enjoyable. It's been a long time so the details are a bit hazy, but there were 2 bands that opened for them. One was a rock group with the singer on a piano, that was pretty cool. The other was William Elliot Whitmore I believe, who was also drunk, and kept saying "Fucking A". Anyways Murder By Death was fucking awesome. They've got this amazing cellist who has the coolest cello I've ever seen.
Her cello is just a narrow piece of wood. I guess it's an electric cello, so it doesn't need a resonating chamber. They played a lot of good songs, including Brother and most of the ones I like on Who Will Survive, but they DIDN'T play Killbot 2000. While I was disappointed by that, it was still a very good show. I got myself a Murder By Death shirt and poster, which has a flying turtle on it. It's pretty fucking awesome. (Fucking A!)

What have I been listening to recently? I've listened to quite a bit of Stars, as usual, but I can't really say I've branched out much. Hopefully I'm not getting old. I've also listened to a good deal of The Submarines. I really like the emotional quality of their music: wistful yet upbeat.

On November 20 I traveled back to Tallahassee for the Broken Social Scene concert at The Moon. I'll leave that for another post because I have a lot of picture and video that I want to add in, so I'll have to figure that out first. I found out that Land Of Talk is a very good band, and I've also listened to a lot of that. I'll also talk about them in the next post.


Most recently I've been fiddling with music software. I've previously tried using Songbird for a variety of tasks, such as searching for music or trying to listen to my library, but it was in a beta phase and didn't work for me. They recently released 1.0, and I must say it's worked much better. One of my previous gripes was that all my metadata tags were messed up because Windows Media Player decided to try to fix everything once. Then Songbird decided to freeze while reading the metadata, so my library didn't get organized at all.

I still use Foobar for organization and tagging, because it's just much better at it, but Songbird has nice playlists and it also boasts nice web integration. It has the core of Firefox, so it can browse the web pretty well. Also, it's completely open source, so there should be a lively community building up for it. I've already gotten some extensions for Last.fm support and safer web browsing. It's still in its early stages so we'll see how much I decide to use Songbird in the future. First of all they should implement some of the perks of Foobar, such as the ability to organize the library, and more comprehensive metadata support.

Just very recently I've been listening to a lot of Okkervil River. They're my second most played artist, but I don't listen to them regularly like I do Stars. I listen to them in very large bursts, usually when I've got something bothering me. I love folk music because of the darker content, the wistful feel, and I really do love the banjo. I've already given my views on the banjo, but hell it's such a beautiful instrument.
I'm pretty sure Okkervil River was the first "folky" music that I fell in love with, so I guess they sort of define good Indie Folk for me. Also a lot of their music is written in A major, so I can play along on my harmonica, which complements the music very well. I just need to get better and learn more techniques.

Oh yes and Of Montreal concert on friday. I'm so excited.

Yeah. Broken Social Scene report with pictures and video to come later.

upcoming concerts

Murder By Death at Common Grounds Oct 25 (my birthday!)
HEALTH at Club Downunder Oct 27
Broken Social Scene at The Moon Nov 20
Of Montreal at The Venue Dec 5
yay!
much better bands than the beginning of the year. I was going to be very disappointed if there weren't better bands. Broken Social Scene should be amazing, even if they play mostly new material. I'll try to get them to play Almost Crimes. I might also be going to A Place To Bury Strangers, since it's at CDU and Ethan is offering me a ride, so it's free.

Still listening to much of the same folk stuff. listened to specifically The Mountain Goats for a while and now Murder By Death. I've got a music listening test coming up so I'm going to be listening to a lot of "classical" music. Actually it's not classical, it's Baroque and Medieval, but the classification is colloquially classical (alliteration much?), so that's what I'll call it.
I've got to identify a bunch of stuff about the composition and composer, so I'll be studying a lot this coming week.

the glaciers made you

and now you're mine. Seriously, listen to that song (Your Rocky Spine, by Great Lake Swimmers). That's another song that I'm going to listen to obsessively, since it's just so amazing. Unfortunately the rest of the album isn't as good, which is disappointing, because I haven't gotten to the rest of the album yet and I would have liked it to be just as good.


Recently I've listened to a lot of more Folk music. I've always listened to some, such as Eisley, Okkervil River, The Decemberists, etc. Recently I've also acquired Fleet Foxes, some Shearwater, The Dodos, Iron & Wine, and now Great Lake Swimmers. I haven't had much opportunity to listen to The Dodos or Shearwater yet, but The Dodos sound good. I never really listened to Folk as a genre, and instead listened to artists individually, but the right kind of Folk (I guess Indie Folk) is actually quality. Folk appeals to me because of the banjos, which I love despite the hillbilly stereotype. In the right settings and the right style the banjo is actually a lovely instrument, having a warm tone and flowing rhythm. It's unfortunate that banjo is only present in more "backwards" genres. Another quality of Folk music that seems to be less prevelant elsewhere is vocal harmony. While other genres tend to put differing melodies together, Fleet Foxes and Eisley harmonize the same melody very well. It might be because harmony is one of the defining qualities of Folk music, though I saw no reference on Wikipedia.


Apart from that, Of Montreal's new album Skeletal Lamping has leaked, though a few days still remain until its official release. Musically it is much more diverse, with a constantly changing sound and style, a lot of which is really fun, like the R&B stuff in St. Exquisite's Confessions. Also Okkervil River released a new album (The Stand Ins), which I completely didn't hear about. It's still inferior to the early albums, but much improved over The Stage Names, which, except for Unless It's Kicks, lacked emotion and basically sucked (ohNOES, Roland is being a pretentious music critic).


I also got a harmonica, partly because I have to bring an instrument to music class on Friday, partly because I've been needing an instrument, and partly because my uncle is pretty baller at harmonica. He's this sorta skinny guy (everyone in Taiwan is skinny) with a huge philosopher beard, he smokes, he's a professor in Taiwan, and he has epic harmonica skills. He also has a really cool harmonica. I don't know if it's just because he's not a parental, but he seems like a really cool guy. I think he also does calligraphy and random philosophical awesomeness. He also told me not to get worked up about my parents. Cool points for him!


I've also ordered a Kalimba, which is similar in layout to a piano, though the mechanism and sound are completely different. The first time I saw it was a video of Architecture In Helsinki, where some guy was just plinking along, looking awesome all the while. When I read about it in some article I recognized it and finally knew what it was called. Anyways this is an instrument of African descent, and it comes with pickups! I'll actually have reason to bust out that amp that I've had under my bed for a while.

hooray

Lots of stuff happening recently. First of all there are some really good concerts coming up. Of Montreal is coming December 5th, and that show should be completely crazy. Their new album Skeletal Lamping is coming out soon, so there will probably be a lot of new things at the concert. And they're crazy anyways, so a good show can be expected. Also Murder By Death is coming sometime near the end of October, I don't really remember when.

I heard it first in Lauren's car and thought it was pretty good. I didn't do anything about it for a few weeks, then suddenly became inspired and got some of the albums. Mainly I listen to Who Will Survive And What Will Be Left Of Them (a mouthful, anyone?), since it's pretty much epic. I really like Murder By Death because of the instrumentation. They have good keyboards and include a cellist, which is fucking awesome, since their tracks sound amazing. Just listen to Killbot 2000 and you'll be forced to agree. You can even download it for free there. The whole album is great, so I think it'll definitely be worth going to that concert.

Also I forgot to mention last post that I got my Stars shirt and poster. I didn't have anything to hang the poster with for a few days, until I went to the poster shop near the Union and got some sticky stuff. It's on the wall opposite my pillow so I can look at it as it glows at night I guess. And now I have the new EP. From what I've heard (it's currently on the first play through) it's really chill and quite good. I've always liked the chill Stars material (On Peak Hill, Don't Be Afraid To Sing, Calendar Girl, etc), so now I can listen to this EP when I'm in the mood. I'm quite happy I got the CD, because now I can make high quality rips (about 900 kbps lossless yay!) and listen to it with my good headphones.

Oh and two nights ago I went to a concert with Calvin. There were a bunch of local (meaning Florida, I guess) bands playing. They were all decent, though only the last band, The Dead Songwriters, really stood out. I got a shirt and CD for $10, cause it was pretty fucking cheap and pretty good.

updateish

Listening mostly to older things like The National and BSS, and some instrumental stuff like Sigur Rós. My roommate and I are going to share music, so I put a lot of cool stuff on a hard drive. I think his stuff is also pretty cool, though the stuff we listen to is pretty exclusive.
So I added:
Okkervil River
Animal Collective
Beulah
BSS
Handsome Furs
Metric
PTM
Of Montreal
Neutral Milk Hotel
Stars
The National
Wolf Parade
Sigur Rós

If anyone thinks of anything I should add feel free to add suggestions

don't forget to breathe

So when I was at Preview Ethan asked if I listened to Beulah. I told him I didn't, but I had heard of them. So he told me to play a track on his laptop which conveniently hooked up to the car, and it sounded pretty good. The song was "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill", which is a reference to Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find". Apparently the lead singer Miles Kurosky enjoys the works of Flannery O'Connor, and the song is about a car accident his father was in. Beulah is now disbanded but was part of the illustrious Elephant 6 Recording Company, which included Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal, and The Apples in Stereo.

Anyways I'm listening to the album Yoko, which is their last and supposedly best work. A lot of the songs are bittersweet, because Beulah had already announced their breakup. It's less poppy than the other album The Coast Is Never Clear, which contains the song Ethan played. Some classic indie pop is always worth a listen, and it's a shame that they disbanded. Ethan said that the lead singer is doing some solo work, so hopefully we'll see some of that in the future.